What is left of the feeling of belonging when you have moved away from home, lived abroad for many years and taken only very few things from earlier days to accompany you on your way? After stations in Jena, New York, Zurich, and Berlin, the photographer Tom Licht (b. 1972) returned to his hometown in southern Thuringia and, equipped with old photos and the family album, set out in search of objects and places from his childhood and their persistence into the present. In his childhood home, he encounters familiar objects that evoke memories of days gone by; he finds stories that he wrote as a youth, a Stasi report on the next-door neighbor and documents, in which the atmosphere of the time is still palpable; he wanders through the village landscape, which endures all the changes peacefully and quietly. In an objective stocktaking, Tom Licht documents his childhood home with all its stability and changes – and makes a sketch of that imponderable sensation somewhere between security and alienation, longing and separation, which his hometown
triggers in retrospect.
With this work on identity and its processual nature, Tom Licht follows up on his publication Father, Son and the War (Kehrer 2015).